All seeing SLAM (360 camera)

Behold, the All Seeing Eye. One day, I gazed upon such a thing on the internets, and it intrigued me. I said to myself; Thou shall build thyself such a Thing! And in (approximately) 4 hours (give or take a week for parts), I have at last constructed such a Thing. And all the robots said "it was good".

In all seriousness though, my 360 camera consists of a few parts: (1) cheapo self focusing (IMPORTANT) webcam from Amazon.com, (2) plastic ends of a shipping tube (free), a small square of clear lexan (free), and (1) shiny silver Christmas ornament. Glue camera to one base, glue ornament to other base, roll lexan plastic into a tube, and glue both pieces onto each end of the tube. Viola! Insta-360.

Unfortunately the quality of the reflective surface for the ornament is very, very poor. I originally thought to use a concave circular car mirror I found at Wal-Mart for $1, but the FOV proved to be too narrow. Other options were unavailable due to expensive-ness.

Now to hook this up to a 'bot... hmm...

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When I was visiting a University in GuangZhou they had serveral soccer playing robots that used eyes like this. Combined with their round base and 4 Omni wheels the robots could travel in any direction as well as see in any direction.

The biggest problem they had was teaching the robot to interperate what it was seeing while zooming around the playfield at high speed. Part of the problem was how the curved mirror distorted the image, especially close up.

I think the first thing you need to do is write some code that compensates for the distortion prior to the robot trying to recognize anything.

Neat! I'm glad to see you venturing away from the dangerous world of cloaks and daggers. My thought on the quality of the reflective surface is that some ornaments are plastic and some glass-have you tried both, and if so, which one is best? Perhaps some sort of coating (like the kind on MC photographic lenses) on the Lexan would help as well, or using a glass (and therefor more expensive and shatter-prone) tube instead could contribute.

This ornament seems to be glass. They're coated with a silver nitrate solution. Unfortunately the quality control is horrible (a pack of 10 for $2.50). There are a lot of scrapes and artifacts on the surface.

I want to stay away from glass for the very reasons you listed, and my research on other plastic tubes came up very expensive :x.